Re: Magic is useless!

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 05:06:40PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 07Jan2002 12:24PM (-0500), Daniel Veillard wrote:
>  
> >   Yep, IMHO Mime-Type are slowing falling into obsolescence due to
> > composition and the fact that it's such a f...g pain to update that
> > registry that some new format tend to not even bother.
> > 
> >   The goal of the Mime-Type was to associate processing tool with
> > resources. Unfortuantely it's a too limited view to cope with most
> > of the complex formats.
> 
> Actually, it's still a very important need. Given a file, you need to
> know what applications can open it. 

  totally agreed. But the format is too rigid 

> I'm well aware of the limitations of MIME (for example, mime types
> don't let you have arbitrary levels of subtyping, which makes it hard
> to support both generic XML-based applications and ones specific to a
> particular kind of XML document). But it's the standard, it's what you
> get from a web server, it's what you get in mail, etc.
> 
> I'm all for a better file typing system, but I don't think GNOME can
> invent one by itself.

  Agreed too, but the discussion fostered from the initial goal of
adding Mime-types support to low level storage APIs, I'm just saying
one should make provision for more than Mime-types in the APIs.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/